Ride With the Devil: "...how bad bad luck can be"

Ride With the Devil (1999) was dumped into the marketplace over a decade ago with only the most meager fanfare, a magisterial Civil War epic featuring several young rising stars that was somehow immediately rendered little more than a footnote of strictly cult interest in the careers of director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus. All this despite the fact that this celebrated collaborative team had previously enjoyed enormous acclaim with Sense and Sensibility (95) and The Ice Storm (97), and would soon enjoy massive commercial success with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (00). After hearing it praised every couple of years or so by the few people I knew who’d managed to see it, I finally experienced Ride With the Devil for myself last week, thanks to a fine new release from the Criterion Collection. The film’s neglect now seems even more astonishing to me, given that it is surely the equal of Lee and Schamus’ finest work. It is a rare Hollywood film that embraces both a broad canvas and rigorously iconoclastic approach to one of the great troubled subjects of US history. Photographed by Frederick Elmes, it’s beautiful in its bucolic visions yet largely eschews gloss and doesn’t linger unduly on the prettiness of its stars. Based on the novel Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, it holds moments of tenderness of an endearingly awkward sort, yet most of its key scenes revolve around acts of rampant savagery that recall the most brutal evocations of Cormac McCarthy. It is, of course, a western of sorts.

It begins, shrewdly enough, with a wedding, the calm before the storm. It initially seemed to me burdened with too much overtly ominous and exposition-laden dialogue, but this passage is brief, and after we’re settled in our seats we’re quickly shaken out of them once the central characters’ lives are swept up in their nation’s apocalyptic crisis. We meet two friends, Missouri boys who unthinkingly side with the secessionists, Jake “Dutchy” Roedel (Tobey Maguire), the teenage son of a German immigrant, and Jack Bull Charles (Skeet Ulrich), who’s a little older and at times needs to look after the less experienced Jake. Their friendship is mirrored by that of the aristocratic George Clyde (Simon Baker) and former slave Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright), one of many black men who, for all kinds of reasons best not simplified, fought alongside those who were fighting to keep them enslaved. The story unfolds in such a way that it’s not obvious from the start who our real protagonists will be—Wright doesn’t even speak until 45 minutes in—a little narrative slight-of-hand that pays off brilliantly as we see the merciless vagaries of war wreak havoc on conventional heroic trajectories.

Residing far from the war’s hot points, these guys fight not as enlisted men but as guerillas, a point that serves to emphasize the chaos and meaningless violence that filled the margins of the Civil War’s official campaigns. The guerillas keep their hair long and wear broad-brimmed hats, looking like prototypes for Lynard Skynard. They fight only seasonally, hiding out over the winter, like animals, for fear that the tracks of their horses’ hooves will sabotage their strategies. They’re not organized like a regular army but are every bit as capable of atrocity, something made grotesquely clear in the films’ depeiction of the 1863 Lawrence Massacre, in which the guerillas, some of them already drunk, descend on the Kansas town at dawn, unannounced, to slaughter each and every man they find, sometimes while they lay wounded under the weeping figures of their wives. It’s the major turning point in Ride With the Devil, not in the sense that our central characters become suddenly politically enlightened, but that the infernal inhumanity they bear witness to finally reaches a breaking point. Most of the people being killed, Jake observes, “are just a bunch of ordinary folks finding out just how bad bad luck can be.”

Jake might just be Maguire’s most interesting role, one that invites him to trust in the verity of his inherent, saucer-eyed innocence, rather than trying to comment on the part or ingratiate himself. Though he’s naturally good-humoured, Jake’s learning curve is tremendous and deeply pathetic. It’s a marvelous moment when toward the film’s end he had his haircut and is told by his impromptu barber (Tom Wilkinson) that he looks 21 again. Jake says, “I’m only 19.” His barber tells him, “You’ll never look 19.” There’s an amazing scene soon after that finds the virginal Jake about to make love to a beautiful woman. She repeatedly asks him if he’s ever had sex, but all he can answer, rather defensively, is that he’s killed 15 men. But the most affecting and elegantly wrought piece of acting in Ride With the Devil is easily that of Wright, who never overplays the colossal irony of his role, but uses a little characteristic sway of the head or suspicious glance here and there to make his presence more than felt. Wright’s Holt is a character of vast complexity that needs to be at least partly left to our imagination, though there is a nicely measured scene that makes the core of his journey explicit, one in which he realizes that the most devastating moment in his adult life is also precisely the moment in which he begins to truly feel like a free man. It’s a quiet scene in a film of grand spectacle, yet it constitutes the film’s unforgettable emotional climax.

1973: The year of awkward sex, permissive parenting and tentative transgression

Early in the commentary track he shares with writer/ producer James Schamus featured on Criterion’s new two-disc special edition, director Ang Lee describes The Ice Storm (1997) as a “disaster film.” While it might seem laughable to apply this genre to a movie concerned with upper-middle class domestic conflict in 1973 suburban Connecticut, it proves an inspired way of contextualizing the movie’s cycle of events. Based on Rick Moody’s novel, The Ice Storm does in fact contain a pair of disasters, the larger being that of the Watergate scandal, the more immediate being the weather event of the title. Neither disaster promises pyrotechnics or rampant death, yet both have some sort of transformative effect on the characters. This effect works best when functioning on the level of atmosphere, but there’s also a tangible, irreversible effect that ultimately drapes an overwhelming shadow over the entire story.

It’s about two families. Ben and Elena Hood (Kevin Kline and Joan Allen) struggle amiably through marital disharmony, placating themselves with a casual affair and kleptomania respectively. Their teenage children Paul and Wendy (Tobey Maguire and Christina Ricci) use the freedom granted to them by their desperate to be hip parents to explore pharmaceuticals and sex with a precocious inquiry. Jim and Janey Carver (Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver) by comparison seem more mutually remote and programmatic in their mid-life crises. Their sons Mikey and Sandy (Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd), the former an already dreamy kid precariously enamored with weed, the latter sensitive to the point of paralysis, his only outlet for expression coming from a predilection for blowing shit up (okay, so actually there are a few pyrotechnics), are the willing playmates of the pro-active Wendy, who engages each in separate games of show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. Building tensions up toward the night of the storm, where the parents abandon the kids to attend a key party drenched in pathos, the story operates around this generational role reversal: what happens when the parents act like kids and vice versa.

In the same sense that Brokeback Mountain (2005) –Lee’s other most fundamentally American film– can be regarded as being about the failure of love to overcome outspoken social antipathies toward homosexuality, The Ice Storm can be said to be about the failure of The Sexual Revolution to overcome the repressive apparatus of the American family/community. This sense of failure emerges from a series of interesting conditions: virtually every character is either too old or too young to have come of age during the radical cultural shifts of the late 1960s; the characters exist largely within a community cut off from the unruly influence of cosmopolitan life by geography and affluence; and crucially, the film climaxes with a fatal tragedy that reverberates hugely through the final sequence, feeling unavoidably like some cosmic punishment for half-hearted experiments in permissive parenting. This ending still feels to me like this terrifically rich film’s one major misfire, reducing the complex relationships by way of what feels like the act of a forsaken and vengeful God. (It bears mentioning that Lee’s only previous appearance on a Criterion disc was his introduction to The Virgin Spring (1960), a film with a weirdly similar finale.)

Of course it would be even more reductive to judge The Ice Storm solely on such a reading of its last reel. Inherent in the film’s unusual multitude of central characters, with their ongoing, measured transgressions, their flashes of fleeting insight and their general lack of decisiveness, is the idea of the movie as a multifaceted portrait rather than a traditional linear narrative anchored by some overt moral lesson or resolution. Lee himself felt attracted to a Cubist method of directing, wanting to show varying sides of a situation, an idea or an emotion all at once –and indeed, without employing any overly conspicuous formal device, he achieves this effect quite well, through the careful placement of figures in a frame, the mirroring of gestures and images from one scene to the next, and, most of all, the tremendously detailed performances from his extraordinary cast.

A lot of attention was paid to Weaver when the film came out. Her subtle balancing of Janey’s exterior frigidity with an inner vulnerability is genuinely impressive, but her character remains marginal. Allen’s character by contrast feels more central and certainly more desperate, yet Elena nonetheless feels a bit too sketched out. Kline, who Moody himself credits with deepening his character, stands out from all the other adults because his weaknesses are so acute, his humiliation so squirm-inducing, and his deficiencies so tenderly undercut by the actor’s ingratiating persona. But the fact is The Ice Storm belongs to the kids: moony-eyed Wood conveys such innocent rapture; Maguire’s wavering voice and goofily cavalier way with literary references imbues his every attempt at confident delivery with a near-palpable ache; Hann-Byrd’s unbreakable astonishment with everything around him is both heart-breaking and totally hilarious; and Ricci, more than anyone, embodies the film’s tender hesitancy and desire for some elusive self-realization and sensual fulfillment. She’s just amazing.

Besides the commentary track, Criterion’s typically superlative extras include some very good new cast interviews (which reveal Weaver in particular to be an actor who admirably takes little for granted), some reflections from Moody, plenty of fun, candid material from the duo of Lee and Schamus, some interesting deleted scenes, and some fascinating making-of stuff from costume designer Carol Oditz, cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, Night on Earth) and production designer Mark Friedberg, all of whom provide enlightening testimony on their detailed work and make an impressive case for the liberal use of biodegradable hair gel when wanting to evoke an ice storm in the middle of spring.